Diary entry 9

(Diary entries are intended to be read in order)

Having pinpointed the source of this hole as being my mother, I was able to focus a reiki session on this issue with the intention of healing my heart and mind from the trauma of growing up with the hole of perpetual fear, despair and loneliness inside me, which, probably, in combination with the other inhospitable conditions of my childhood, was the greatest source of my adult suffering. Once healed, I thought, I ought to be able to function in life on a more level playing field with other people, thus, hopefully, ceasing the perpetual series of waking nightmares that I was trapped in. Thus, I set aside a reiki treatment for myself in which I focused on this “hole.”

I carried out this reiki session on myself thoroughly. It was the longest session I have ever done. The results were immediate, effective and surprising.

I had already been reiking myself with quite successful results for a month or two. I had been feeling very optimistic and “up,” feeling I had left my depression and suicidal thoughts in the past, with the one exception of waking up in the mornings before the beginning of the day with the usual sinking feeling of doom and despair, fear and futility. Despite these relatively mild morning experiences of this “hole of doom,” I felt relatively happy and optimistic during my waking hours.

The Mother of All Healing Crises

So, I reikied myself concerning this hole on a Monday morning in February, without specifying a source or a cause for the hole. By the time I went to bed, unbeknownst to me, I began to feel the effects of my reiki session. I felt a cold coming over me. During the night as I slept, I became increasingly ill. I developed a fever with full-blown flu symptoms and a horrible headache.

When I woke up in the morning, I was hopeless and depressed. I woke up realizing that, after barely surviving the devastation of Lucifer and after coming within a broken foot of killing myself, I was pursuing a new life purpose, which was not truly my heart’s desire. I realized that my heart’s desire was a dream that fate and the nature of my past would not allow, or at least I acknowledged that I had this belief. I acknowledged in that moment, as I lay in bed with my eyes still closed, my belief that the spiritual love I had dreamt and lived my whole life for could never be. Thus, I basically woke up crying, and sick.

Not only this, but I fell as deeply back into suicidal depression as I had been the preceding spring when I had planned to kill myself (see My Suicidal Foot). I stayed in my room all day crying inexplicably and feeling horribly ill. Emotionally, I had regressed to how I had been throughout my 30’s—I would burst into tears with no sign of a reason, perhaps something on TV, something that was not even visibly sad. I cried a lot that day and for the days that followed. I learned soon that this sickness was no usual cold for me, because it did not follow the pattern of a cold. It did not let go of me easily. It stayed for over a week, going away very slowly.

On the Thursday of that same week, I had an appointment with my psychologist, during which I had a complete emotional break-down. I just cried and cried. It was on that occasion that my psychologist observed that my depression was suppressed anger I harbored towards my mother. Her observation seemed to support the previous observations I had made of my own behavior in the context of love relationships and of the inner feelings that gave rise to my behavior within love relationships.

During that week, I should mention, I was also engaged in a struggle with my mother, which magnified the depth and intensity of the hole, leaving me feeling scared and alone, desperate and abandoned again. The hole was sucking me up again, sucking me up.

Due to the massive emotional breakdown I had suffered the previous year, during which I quit my long-despised job and that had led me to therapy in New York City, I was being supported financially by my mother, who, along with my step-father, preferred not to have me residing in their home, despite the cost of rent my mother was paying for me.

At the time I did this reiki session on myself, my mother had begun to express vexation and resentment at me for having to sacrifice some of the abundance of her money to support me. I felt myself falling through that really thin film that was supporting my weight as I stood upon that hole. I, with no ability, emotional or otherwise, to take care of myself, began planning my death again, or at least began planning a life on the streets, which would inevitably lead to my death.

The Blessed Light at the End of the Tunnel

After one week, my sickness had subsided and after about 2 weeks, my depression began to subside. I noticed a new emotional experience in myself—or lack thereof. I was waking up in the mornings in an emotional void—a true hole. What I had always believed to be a hole, I saw now had really been a black hole, a vacuum that was actively sucking into oblivion all things positive, for what I was experiencing these mornings was a true hole—a hole is empty, not filled with fear and despair. I was now awaking with emptiness—no fear, no despair, no doom, not even a little tinge, but there was no good feeling present in the hole either. It was a marked improvement over a hole of despair, or a black hole that sucked up positive thoughts and feelings and left me with the most horrible, devastating feelings, thoughts and fears about myself and my life. I felt the nothingness was quite ok. It left me feeling a certain kind of relief.

A few days after waking up with emotional emptiness in the place where used to dwell the greatest doom and fear of my life, in a meditation, I felt Angel Mother begin to fill in the new void in my heart with love. I felt it more and more every day.

And this is the story of how I healed what I believe to have been the greatest source of my suicidal depression. This constitutes a massive milestone in my healing process.

Diary entry 8

(Diary entries are intended to be read in order)

With my new-found healing treasure, I began reiking myself for everything I could think of, starting with my most prominent issues and sources of continued and most poignant suffering, including my ingrained behavioral patterns or deep-seated, self-destroying emotions and thoughts which had become states of existence for me since childhood. My experience in psychoanalyzing myself and my continued visits to my psychologist enabled me to understand and articulate angles of my issues which, in turn, enabled me to target certain multi-faceted, self-destroying attitudes, beliefs or past experiences in my reiki.

My Living Death

The greatest and most firmly ingrained and most devastating state I had been imbued with was a state which had grown in me from my youngest formative years, my toddler years, prospering and transforming, like a viral bacteria in its ideal reproductive environment, into increasingly invincible strains, as I became more and more laden and buried down day by day beneath the traumas and neglect that came to constitute my childhood, and then my adolescence. By the age of 20, this state had taken the outward form of ever-present suicidal depression.

Over the years, I observed that this state was limitless in its degrees of intensity and in the situations and aspects of situations in which I would feel it rearing its ugly head within me. I came to view the two extreme degrees of this state as two separate images. When I was at my best, this state felt to me as a hole deep in the core of my being, manifesting most often in mornings, as recently as this past winter, when I would wake up alone in my bed, no matter what the weather, what the country, what the city, what the situation, and, before thoughts of the day ahead would begin to fill my mind, deep in the pit of my soul, I would feel this hole; a hint of doom, despair and futility, which I could perpetually find at the very nucleus of my being. It brought worry and fear to my heart and mind. On the best days, I would get up feeling the hole and then begin my day and the hole would be covered over with daily concerns and activities. On my worst or more sensitive days, it brought me to endless cascades of tears.

At its worst, this state was my living death. By my definition, “living death” could be said to be like being slowly and painfully tortured every day to within inches of death, just close enough to death, that you may wake up the next morning, barely functional, to again be tortured to within inches of death, day, after day, after day, after day.

My living death found its expression in me regularly in my poems, but, in time, more and more it was expressed in plans of suicide, in suicidal depression, in floods of tears, set off by God-knows-what, or by nothing external at all, consumed in fear, in despair and loneliness, the intensity and depths of which you simply cannot imagine.

My living death consumed me with fear and despair each time I would love a man—fear that he would abandon me, or pull away from me. I would feel the slightest hint of discontent in his voice, or in his email, or in his behavior and feel and fear him pulling away from me, and I would feel that shakey, precarious floor I had finally almost found my footing on being pulled out from under my feet again. Again, I would be alone and insane with desperation, in tears, falling again, losing my grasp on something safe, something stable, over and over and over again.

This, fear, however, did not solely surface in love with men, but in all aspects of my life. From as far back as I can remember, I have been afraid for my safety, for my very survival, especially and above all the survival of my heart—it did not begin with men. Nothing in life had ever been stable or safe. My heart and mind were in pieces long before I was a teenager in love, but I had no idea there was something amiss.

This state, which I believe took root in me as an emotion of profound loneliness and desperate fear from a very young age, at first in absence of a mother and in absence of any source of even a small fraction of safety from the violent emotions and neglect of the family around me, found a permanent home in the core of my child-soul. It had become the roots from which I grew. I had no idea of the nature or vastness of this state, much less its power over all my life, but I became mildly aware of it in my 20’s when I was seeing a psychologist, who, according to society, is somehow supposed to fix my broken heart and mind, uproot the weeds that had been so deeply planted, which had now solidified and over-grown in my child-heart, or enable me to uproot them myself.

This state, from its cozy hiding place, wedged deeply in my subconscious, was the thing which was most profoundly sabotaging my efforts to survive, let alone succeed, in this world. Everything from finding a job, from having a loving relationship and friends to … finding a home … I can’t even begin to express on how many levels this devastating state was influencing my life and every effort I made at finding a peaceful, happy existence.

Realizing the Damage and its Extent

It took me decades to come to a sufficient understanding of the true nature of my plight and of my internal reality—that I had been formed from a tender age within a state of doom and fear and how this formation came to pass. I went through several misguided beliefs concerning this state of doom. Throughout my 20’s, when, as I mentioned, I was able to begin to perceive this state, or “hole,” I believed I had been created by God with a melancholy soul, because, even in the best situation I could imagine, I felt this melancholy, this hole, was so profound in me, that it was actually part of my eternal soul. At a later point, I believed this hole was the result of my medical condition, PKU, and the fact that, as a result of this condition, I had too much phenylalanine in my blood, which is a cause of depression and other psychological conditions (some of which I do suffer and have suffered from) and which is known to reduce serotonin in the brain, which is the chemical cause of the feeling of happiness.

Over the years, being perpetually misunderstood and looked down upon by the “emotional elite,” as I called “happy people,” I have endeavored in vain at least to be understood, since there was no compassion or help to be had from anyone, by describing this particular state in such a way that “the happy people” might be a little kinder or more understanding, at least that they might stop reacting in ways that made me feel worse about myself and about my life than I already did. This was a Sisyphean undertaking, however. Even a willing person, and few were willing, could fathom the experience of my living death, but my best attempt to date can be found in the poem If.

During the years I had to live with family, the years during which I was being formed in this state of doom, I would escape the outward hell by withdrawing into my mind, dreaming of love, of a special husband who I could love and take care of, someone who would love me, who knew me on a profound, spiritual level that no one else was capable of. I had daydreams of perhaps forming my own little family of love with him, never having to speak to anyone from my biological family ever again. My father further punished and chastised me for my escapist tendencies and most interactions with family members were of a negative nature and only served to make me even more determined to escape those people and that wretched reality once and for all.

Outsiders said I was a dreamer and that I lived in my own world. True, but their observations were useless; not one person ever endeavored to understand or to help me deal with the real world. I was on my own, as in my living death, left up to my own undeveloped and inadequate devices to survive alone in this world.

Life After the Family

Once freed of the destructive familial environment, at age 20, the axe of despair fell upon me with a vengeance. When you are in the fire, your body reacts involuntarily in such a way as to protect you from feeling the full force of the pain, but once you are out of the fire, God help you; the pain of having been in the fire floods every cell in your body and the sensations of excruciating agony sweep over and through your body like a salt-sea wave on raw, burned flesh. This applies on the physical level, and I have observed the same phenomenon on the psychological level, with the brain providing defense mechanisms to dull the impact of the psychological devastation of the immediate situation. You cannot heal while you are in the midst of the fire that is burning you. Once out of the fires of your familial hell, your body and all of your senses awaken to the reality that it was living in hellfire and now it must suffer the aftermath in an environment that will only coat you with more salt and not offer you any first aid–or such was my experience. Once I was out of my “familial hellfire,” I fell into suicidal depression within a few months, and remained there until a few months ago, 21 years, roughly.

In more recent years, however, due to observation of myself as I was suffering through relationships, and due to my own self-psychoanalytical abilities, it dawned on me that this hole/living death seemed to be directly related to my mother. By January of 2009, however, thanks to sessions with the psychologist that I had begun seeing in New York City in the summer of 2008, I had become quite familiar with the cause of this hole/living death; it was all about neglect, the lack of a mother, lack of love, lack of security, lack of being cared for as a very young child and right up until…

And this realization paved the way for my grandest reiki healing experience – the next milestone on my healing path.

Please note that the comments are closed on all “My Diary” entries. This category is to read like a book, and each post as a chapter. Please feel free to use the contact form on the “Contact” page for any feedback.

Diary entry 2

This time last year, I was in Algeria and I had suffered a profound mental and emotional breakdown. This time last year, I had unofficially quit my translation job of ten years. This time last year, I had a plan; I was going to kill myself and I had a plan to do it. Prior to this, I had done research on effective and sure ways to commit suicide, and I had pondered and begun to devise plans, but I had never had a plan as likely to succeed as this one, and I had never had the preparedness to execute such a plan. This time I did.

My plan necessarily involved travel. In one week, my visa to stay in Algeria would expire, so I had to leave. My plan necessitated that I be in a specific country (not Algeria) and that I store my luggage in the airport lockers of an airport in that specific country. It necessitated that I then travel to a specific area of that country to complete the execution of my plan, all on my own. On this day last year, I had this plan.

On March 26th last year, I was walking to the bus in Ain Turck, Algeria to go into the nearby city, Oran, to buy food. On my way, I fell on the sidewalk and broke my foot. At 40 years old, I had never gotten any more than scrapes and bruises from falling down, and hadn’t broken a bone since I was six years old…until last March 26th, 2008. I would blame the miniature rock quarries that pass for sidewalks in Algeria, except for the fact that I was actually walking on a portion of sidewalk that was completely safe and in-tact. My shoes were a little big, and my feet were sliding around a lot in them, but still…

On this very day last year, March 27th, in meeting a certain Algerian…let’s call him “Lucifer”… I had fulfilled the reason I had gone to Algeria. In some parallel universe, Lucifer loved me; in this one, he lied to me, he cheated on me and he stole my heart, my mind and my money. I still loved him, because he had loved me and I had never had any feeling of being loved before and I was insanely desperate for it, so I just couldn’t let go of that love, or even the memory of it. I had to meet him one last time, just to see for myself how far away from his love for me he had come. He had come far.

One week after our meeting, I had to leave Algeria…with a broken foot, on crutches…with my luggage. My plan had to be postponed. I couldn’t even carry my own luggage, let alone carry out my plan. The Algerian doctor who had treated me had told me, however, that after two weeks with the cast, I should be able to have it taken off and to walk on my foot.

I left Algeria last year on Saturday, April 5th, the day my visa expired. I had nowhere to go. I had no domicile, I had no home. Prior to departing for Algeria on June 2nd, 2007, I had given up the apartment in Finland I had been living in for ten years and put all of my belongings into storage. I didn’t care what happened to me. You could say I had a death wish and, in a sense, I had become reckless.

So on April 5th I flew out of Oran, Algeria, headed for Paris. I spent two nights at the Charles de Gaulle airport. I had decided in the time at the Paris airport that I would fly to Helsinki, where I had to take care of some matters before dying, so I would also have a doctor take my cast off and then I would proceed with my plan. I was just biding my time at the Paris airport so that the prescribed two weeks would pass by the time the doctor in Finland was to look at my foot.

After two nights at the airport in Paris, I took a plane to Helsinki. I stayed two nights at the Helsinki airport too. On the second day, I went to a medical center, almost miraculously and thankfully located only several meters from the airport itself. I had had the cast on for two weeks to the day. The doctor and the nurse removed the heavy Algerian plaster cast and I became a little perplexed as to how I should be able to walk on my very painful and swollen, very purple and blue colored foot. The Finnish doctor informed me that I must have the cast on for two more weeks, a total of one month. Not only that, but he said I mustn’t fly. He put on a new cast and I was stuck in Finland with a cast, crutches, luggage, no help and nowhere to go but the freezing cold airport. I was forced to call for help.

I called one of the two friends I had made in Finland, knowing I had to impose myself upon her and knowing how the people in that country hate to be imposed upon, especially in their homes. I didn’t think I had any friends of whom I could ever ask such a great imposition. I was crying on the phone when I told my story. My friend said I could stay with her and her family for the two weeks until I got my cast off. Today this friend holds a unique place in my heart, even if our contact is sporadic.

I stayed two weeks with my friend and also managed to take care of the matter I needed to take care of before dying. What happened, however, during those two weeks…I continued to have email contact with Lucifer. Like I said, I still loved him and I still needed him, even mere shadows of his love. He indicated he was worried about me. I told him my plan. He was the only one. He was the only one I could talk to about what was in my heart, including suicide, because he had spoken to me of suicide, and, I believed, he had spoken to me from the depths of his heart.

In the end, I promised Lucifer that I would not kill myself. He had also made some promises to me which he said he would keep on the condition that I take care of myself, not kill myself, and keep him updated as to how I am and what I am doing. I don’t think either of us thought that he would ever keep any of his promises. The truth is, part of me was looking for a reason not to kill myself, part of me didn’t really want to kill myself, after all (it’s not as easy as people think if you think about what you’re doing). Lucifer’s seemingly heartfelt caring, though likely feigned, and his, again seemingly, sincere request for follow-ups on me, plus promises on his part to become a better person, were all I needed to abandon my plan and make a new one. And that’s what I did.

Please note that the comments are closed on all “My Diary” entries. This category is to read like a book, and each post as a chapter. Please feel free to use the contact form on the “Contact” page for any feedback.